I’d like to start building more things. It’s an amazing feeling – a sense that only rarely overtakes me these days. It was a feeling I got with much greater frequency when I was a kid with his mind set on constructing a universe in LEGO bricks. The demands on my time are somewhat higher now, and perhaps too are my own demands for the value of what I build – I focus on building important, worthwhile or valuable things to justify the time it takes to build. Maybe I shouldn’t worry myself with whether the final products justify the toil; maybe I should just shut up and enjoy the ride – take the act of building as something valuable, worthwhile and important. It is, really. More people are building more things now than ever before, and that crowd is one I’d like to join. It’s a crowd made ever-larger by advances in the power of the individual, the independent, and the common citizen of any race, gender or corner of the world. Today’s project is literally putting the power of the sun in the palm of peoples’ hands.

We’ve spent every cent we can scrounge building a Solar Pocket Factory, a small, automated machine that can make solar panels anywhere in the world, at a pace and quality that beats a sprawling factory. We work with a small team of brilliant people from around the world who put their own inspiration into this machine, improving and refining it. Our baby is getting pretty good, now, cranking out solar panels and doing it right. But if we want to impact the world of solar, we need to scale up to get our panels out of our workshops and into people’s hands. And we want to do that with kickstarter, making this the first crowd-funded advance in clean technology.

I’m not saying we need a good reason to build, but I’m saying that there’s a damn good one anyway. Let’s build something that will build something that will build something. Back the Solar Pocket Factory on Kickstarter before September 13.